Syllable-Initial Consonant Development Of Putonghua-Speaking Children

This paper studies the syllable-initial consonant acquisition,based on a sectional study of 149 children from Shi Jiazhuang,Hebei Province.Along with the other few studies of Putonghua acquisition,this paper adds some new information to the database of this area.This paper mainly studies the acquisition order and substation pattern of syllable-initial consonants.According to the data,we find some regularities and trends in consonant acquisition.For stops,front stops are acquired earlier than the back ones.But for fricatives and affricates,there is no such regularity.Aspiration is a distinctive feature in Chinese.For Chinese children,unaspirated segments are acquired before the aspirated counterparts.And the feature of aspiration is acquired at 2;6-3;0.After that,no mistakes will be made between aspirated and unaspirated sounds.Stops are generally acquired earlier than fricatives.Fricatives are acquired earlier than affricates,with the exception of/s/.Among fricatives,/χ/and/с/are acquired earliest,and the second to be acquired is/f/.In terms of place of articulation,the alveolar-palatal fricative and affricates are acquired earlier than the retroflex counterparts.And the retroflex fricative and affricates are acquired earlier than alveolar counterparts.Alveolar and retroflex fricatives and affricates are prone to go though the process of palatalization.Lateral is acquired late,while glides and nasal are acquired early./t/is the most favorite sounds for younger children.A lot of other segments are substituted by/t/.We also find that for most segments,acquisition dose not occur steadily at every stage.There is critical period for each segment.For example,the critical period for aspirated segments is 2;6-3;0.Except the order of acquisition,we also find a correspondence between order and substitution pattern.We have designed a graph for it.At the initial stage of this study, all the consonants have appeared,but the acquisition of them occurs at different stages. The earlier acquired segments tend to substitute the later acquired segments.And the substitute segments are acquired early,while the substituted segments are acquired late.From the substitution pattern,we find some substitution relationship is transitive. It's similar to Stampe(1969)'s'unrestricted application of processes'.This relationship says that,if segment A can be replaced by segment B,segment B can be replaced by segment C,and then segment A can be replaced by segment C.If B stops being replaced by C,then A can't be replaced by C too.Nowadays OT is very popular and powerful.It has shown its strong explanation strength on phonology,thus I'd like to try to analyze my data under this framework. According to learnability algorithm of OT(Tesar and Smolensky's 1993),at the early stage of acquisition,faithfulness constraints are over markedness constraints.Then in a later stage,the markedness constraints are demoted under the faithfulness constraints. This makes children's production identical to adults.This is called the demotion of markedness constraints.The developmental pattern of my data supports this algorithm.